Sid's jottings

• Some football head coaches just watch practice, but not the new man in charge of the Vikings. Mike Zimmer said: "I don't want to be a CEO, I want to be a coach. I want to coach every position and be an expert at every position, and my job is to make every player better. It's really about just being myself. I just love that part of the game, I love taking players and teaching them techniques, I love trying to make them better, I love proving people wrong. Those kinds of things are really what I like to do. At the end of the day my name is on this Minnesota Vikings team, so I'm going to make sure that I'm as involved in it as I need to be. I want my name to be good."

• In addition to being slotted into the top 13 selections in the NBA lottery, the Timberwolves also have the benefit in this year's draft of having three second-round picks — No. 40 from New Orleans, No. 53 from Golden State and their own at No. 44. So Flip Saunders and company potentially have some tools they can trade if they want to improve their position. The Wolves have a 2.18 percent chance of moving up and landing a top-three pick in the lottery.

• Since Target Field opened, the downtown parking ramps owned by the Minnesota Department of Transportation, ramps that were virtually empty before Twins fans started to fill them up on gamedays, have created a lot of additional tax revenue for MnDOT to reinvest in either highways or transit improvement in that corridor. It has been a great success. Then the city of Minneapolis, which didn't gain any tax revenue when the Twins played at the Metrodome, now pockets about $4 million on a ticket tax that is generated from the fifth-year ballpark.

• Former Gophers basketball forward Dan Coleman is playing with the GasTerra Flames in Groningen, Holland, where he is playing in the league championship series. He averaged 11.3 points and 5.5 rebounds in 33 games this season.

Sid Hartman is a sports columnist. He also can be heard weekdays on WCCO AM-830 at 6:40, 7:40 and 8:40 a.m. Follow @SidHartman

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones built one of the most expensive stadiums in the world back in 2009, the $1.3 billion AT&T Stadium, so on Thursday he talked about how impressed he was with the new U.S. Bank Stadium and also about how important the stadium is for Minneapolis and for the NFL at large.